- Had my husband not been on a myriad of psychiatric drugs
for both depression and anxiety, I think it's safe to say he'd still be
alive.
-
- Richard had had pulmonary edema hit him in July, 1995,
which necessitated open heart surgery. A triple by-pass and a double heart
valve replacement was performed a few days after an ambulance delivered
him to Emergency. A mechanical sound, a sort of clicking, emanated from
his chest after that. He lost his job, the FAA having pulled his medical
certificate. Moreover, eight hours in surgery under anasthesia dealt him
a blow neither of us would have expected: the part of his brain where the
sex drive is located was irreparably damaged. He lost all desire. It
never came back. A creeping and debillitating depression engulfed him,
though that was normal the surgeon said. It would take time. Happened
to almost all heart surgery patients.
-
- Rich was becoming increasingly irascible, swimming as
he was in an ocean of misery. Finally I convinced him to seek help. It
was prompted as much by a recognition for self-preservation as a desire
to help my husband, as he was bringing us both down with his morose anger.
Soon I wouldn't be any help to him. Soon I would be in the mud puddle
with him, instead of offering him a stick.
-
- The psychiatrist put him on all sorts of drugs and, yes,
he stopped being quite so depressed, so angry, so anxiety ridden. But
was he his old self? No. In fact I didn't know who he was anymore. A
completely different Richard had evolved, one who still became deeply depressed,
just in a different way. He would break down sobbing instead of becoming
angry. Here he'd been so macho all the years I'd known him, all the years
I'd been his wife. Rode a Harley, fixed our cars, had been a flight engineer,
later Chief Engineer for one of the biggest air freight companies, was
a fisherman, rode horses . . . in short, masculine. What my mom used to
call a man's man. And now I would find him in paroxyms of crying, tears
running down his Marlboro man's cheeks, shoulders heaving. He would accept
no comforting hugs, he would shove me away, yelling at me to leave him
alone.
-
- He began talking suicide. Then double suicide. I tried
cajoling him out of it, but his old sense of humor was gone. Where was
the man I'd married back in '79? Damned if I knew. And damned if I knew
how to cope with what was happening. "Snap out of it, Rich! Get a
grip!" I would counsel, then beg. No longer trusting psychiatry,
I asked him to gradually go off these awful pills that had turned him psycho,
and he complied. But the damage was done.
-
- Walking my dog up the hill by our house one day, I heard
a rifle shot. It was the loudest shot I'd ever in my life experienced.
He had taken his rifle apart, had taken the barrel off, the police told
his daughter later. And then he'd done something a 'suicide' never does---he
left the garage door open. He had completely lost touch, in my opinion,
as there were two bullets loaded into that rifle. One would up in his chest
and the other, given his double suicide bent, had most likely been meant
for me.
-
- Do I believe he'd have murdered me? No. I think he
wanted me to re-enter the garage so he could've given me the choice to
join him, though. How would I have handled the situation? What would
I have done to calm him down? And if I hadn't been successful? Would
he have taken his life in front of me? Was he in fact so far gone that
he would've taken my life, after all? I live with all this.
-
- One thing I do know: Those drugs messed up my husband's
brain. They changed his personality in a bizarre and macabre way. And
now the Bush Administration, may every neo-con rot, wants to test children
for psychiatric disorders so that kids may be placed on these drugs, as
well. You know: To make pharmaceutical fat cats fatter. That's what
it's about, along with mind control and a Satanic vision of an insane population.
-
- I never saw my husband's rifle, secured to his work bench
by his drill press/vise. Because I've never panicked in an emergency situation,
I went on auto-pilot, so to speak, running into the house, dialing 911,
giving the information as I had it to the fellow who took his time answering,
(five rings is an eternity, I'll have you know.) Then I returned to Rich
and tried giving him mouth to mouth prior to the paramedics' arrival, and
the police. But my husband's eyes were open and blank; I hadn't been able
to get a pulse moments prior. I knew. Even if I had entered a state of
shock from which I've yet, eighteen months later, to fully recover.
-
- The point of this piece, in the end, is to proselytize;
to instruct all parents to protest what our burgeoning fascist government
wants to do to your children. Stop the insanity, damn it! Stop trusting
pharmaceutical medicine and stop trusting your government. Recognize your
responsibility to protect your progeny!
-
- I want you to think about my husband, father of three,
lying on that cold garage floor, a bullet in his chest, his life having
oozed out of him in a pool of blood. While you're drawing that mental
picture, keep Columbine in the slide show line-up to be projected next
in your mind.
-
- When those imbeciles try to give your child Ritalin,
realize it's the chemical additives in all the artificial foodstuffs that's
causing ADD, not some deficiency in your child's brain. If your teenager
is depressed, take him/her to Yosemite. Start feeding them organic food,
even if it means only having meat once a week. It won't kill you; quite
the opposite is true.
-
- Remember my words: DRUGS ARE NOT THE ANSWER.
-
- Let us not have an entire generation wind up like my
husband.
-
- Just say no to drugs, to quote good ol' Nancy.
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